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| This article is a currently a work in progress.
Comments: roofscape@gmail.com. |
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In early September 1951 Martin Luther King,
Jr., ML as his father called him, packed his bachelor belongings
into a shiny new green Chevrolet and headed north for the thousand
mile drive to Boston. The Chevy, equipped with the recently introduced
Powerglide automatic transmission that he'd admired in a friend's
car, was a gift from Daddy King as his father, Reverend Martin
Luther King, Sr., was often called by his family and flock. It
was his reward for graduating at the top of his class in May
from Crozer Theological Seminary outside Philadelphia.
1951 was a key year of transition for the
country. The final business of World War II was winding down
and, bridged by the futile Korean War, the Cold War was heating
up.
It was the year of Duck and Cover. Atomic
testing and war games began in the Nevada desert and Marshall
Islands. The first nuclear power plant went into operation. The
Rosenbergs were tried and executed for slipping A-bomb secrets
to the Russians.
The first commercial computer, Univac 1, went
into service and next year predicted the presidential election.
The transistor was developed at Bell Labs. Coast-to-coast direct
phone dialing and TV broadcasts began.
Upon his arrival from the Jim Crow South,
King soon encountered the harsh reality of the segregated North.
I remember very well trying to find a place
to live. I went into place after place where there were signs
that rooms were for rent. They were for rent until they found
out I was a Negro, and suddenly they had just been rented. 1
After some searching he and Phillip Lenud,
a friend from Morehouse College where King did his undergraduate
work, found an apartment at 397 Massachusetts Avenue in the South
End across from the Savoy Cafe. The Savoy has long since ceased
stomping (replaced by an apartment building at 400 Mass. Ave.),
but King's digs still stand, a few doors down from the Orange
Line T station and marked with a small bronze plaque.
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397 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston.
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The South End was the center of black middle
class life and culture throughout the first half of the 20th
century, beginning after 1900 when African Americans moved there
from their historic home on the backside, or black-side, of Beacon
Hill behind the State House. By 1950, they also shared the densely
populated neighborhood with 39 other ethnic groups, many of them
recent immigrants to the country: Syrian, Lebanese, Armenian
and Chinese.
Martin might have preferred to be closer to
campus but racial prejudice prevailed, as we've seen, and he
chose a place just over the tracks of the northeast rail lines,
on the very dividing line between black and white Boston. This
block at the corner of Mass. and Columbus Avenues anchored one
of America's great jazz meccas, home to over a dozen different
clubs offering every sort of America's own music. Two blocks
away, in the white Back Bay, Symphony Hall and the conservatories
programmed and studied European classical music.
Boston had always been, and in the postwar
years still was, racially segregated, as was most of the country.
Unlike the South, segregation wasn't on the books or legislated,
but the de facto lines were clearly drawn in black and white
and well understood by both races. Blacks weren't allowed to
live in most neighborhoods, stay in hotels, eat at restaurants,
work in many jobs, sometimes simply walk the streets and most
of all mingle with whites.
The one area where these racial rules were
relaxed was on this dividing line in the South End where the
jazz clubs catered to both races. Here blacks and whites, audiences
and musicians, freely met, mingled, dug the music, jammed and
romanced.
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The black South End was refulgent with style.
The jazz musicians and dancers were fashion plates and their
patrons followed suit. There were numerous barber shops and beauty
parlors. The Pullmen porters wore immaculate uniforms. And after
syling on Saturday night, a snappy Sunday Best was the required
dress to attend any of the neighborhood's churches, as numerous
as the clubs.
Martin fit right in, always stepping out on
the street in a tailored suit, often tweed, with a white shirt,
crisply knotted tie, fedora, shined shoes, briefcase and meticulously
groomed with a thin mustache and close cropped hair.
He'd been a sharp dresser, a dandy even, since
grade school when his friends - Shag, Rooster, Sack and Mole
among them - nicknamed him Tweedie for the tweed suits
he favored wearing to school (often with a violin under his arm)
and church. But he pulled it off with such panache that he never
suffered ridicule for his finery and slipped easily into Levis
for playing football in the backyard with his crew.
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Tire Jumping. Allan Rohan Crite.
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Martin also worked to develop the affectations
befitting an intellectual, smoking and gesturing with a pipe
as a constant prop, like other many students. His long love of
big words and flowery, ornate phrases also peaked in, and mercifully
moderated after, graduate school. He practiced flourishing signatures
on the back of notebooks to embellish the important documents
he would soon be signing. A distant philosophical gaze, as glimpsed
years later in the photograph at the top of this article, and
a detached, reserved manner of speaking completed the picture
of a worldly urban intellectual of the times grasping with the
big questions.
Boston University was, and is, one of the
country's largest private universities. It was founded as a theological
school in 1839, at the Bromfield Street Church in downtown Boston
by abolitionist Methodist ministers, to provide equal, integrated
education for both races and sexes, a very unusual stance at
that time and for long thereafter. Bromfield was also the church
of David Walker, the fiery black abolitionist activist and author
of the radical 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
World advocating immediate, worldwide black emancipation
via violent insurrection and killing if necessary.
At B.U., King exchanged the cozy, collegial
atmosphere of Crozer, a small seminary in a quiet suburb, for
the anonymous hustle and bustle of a big urban research university
in a major American city. Among the tens of thousands enrolled
at B.U. were two dozen or so black graduate students. King and
Lenud started an informal club for them soon after setting up
house, the Dialectical Society, open to anyone interested
philosophical and/or theological ideas and issues.
Dialectics is a logical conversation, ranging
from informal dialogue to formal debate, between two or more
people wanting to convince the other(s) of their positions, with
perhaps the possibility of achieving a synthesis of the their
various viewpoints. This was the method popularized by Plato's
Socratic Dialogues and used throughout the history of
philosophy.
Martin believed that this struggle, rather
than dogma, was essential to religion. As a teenager he'd developed
deep doubts about the fundamentalism of his father, but religion
he began to think is only alive at the edges. It may be
important to have the courage of one's convictions, but it's
also essential to have the courage of one's doubts.
July 23, 1954 - Boston
Darling,
... I am doing quite well, and studying hard
as usual. I have plenty of privacy here and nobody to bother
me.
We had our Philosophy Club Monday night and
it was well attended. Brother Satterwhite did the paper. ...
Your Darling,
Martin
Letter to Coretta at the Dexter Avenue
church pasonage written while Martin was away on one of his regular
trips back in Boston to work on his doctoral thesis.
The Philosophy Club gathered one evening a
week in King's living room for fellowship, food and conversation
"to solve the problems of the world." A dozen or so
black students, men and women, shared a potluck supper, sipped
coffee and chatted. One of the members would present a formal
paper that they'd written for one of their classes. Then pipe
smoke and lofty technical jargon swirled together in the air
as the others jumped in to oppose or defend the writer's conclusions.
Afterwards, with the dialectics done, the night owls remaining
would settle into a late night bull session.
The club lasted throughout Martin's three
student years in Boston, growing in popularity and eventually
attracting both white students and local college professors.
Professor DeWolf himself, Martin's thesis advisor, dropped in
once and read the paper for discussion on "the meaning of
the kingdom and how it will come."
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Martin had explained his choice of Boston
University (not his first, but Yale Divinity School had rejected
him despite being at the top of his class at Crozer) this way
in his application to the School of Theology.
For a number of years I have been desirous
of teaching in a college or a school of religion. Realizing the
necessity for scholastic attainment in the teaching profession,
I feel that graduate work would give me a better grasp of my
field. At present I have a general knowledge of my field, but
I have not done the adequate research to meet the scholarly issues
with which I will be confronted in thie area. It is my candid
opinion that the teaching of theology should be as scientific,
as thorough, and as realistic as any other discipline. In a word,
scholarship is my goal. For this reason I am desirous of doing
graduate work. I feel that a few years of intensified study in
a graduate school will give me a thorough grasp of knowledge
in my field.
My particular interest in Boston University
can be summed up in two statements. First my thinking in philosophical
areas has been greatly influenced by some of the faculty members
there, particularly Dr. Brightman. For this reason I have longed
for the possibility of studying under him. Secondly, one of my
present professors is a graduate of Boston University, and his
great influence over me has turned my eyes toward his former
school. From him I have gotten some valuable information about
Boston University, and I have been convinced that there are definite
advantages there for me. 2
Edgar S. Brightman was an influential philosopher
and Christian theologian who had many followers among the Crozer
faculty including King's adviser at the seminary. For decades
while teaching at B.U., from 1919 to 1953, Brightman was a leader
of the theological movement called Personalism or more
particularly since he, B.U. and other Boston intellectuals were
such a force in the development and spread of this school of
thought, Boston Personalism.
Personalism posits that the person is central,
both the starting and end point, for understanding the world,
indeed the universe. It believes that all moral truth begins
with the absolute value of the person, the sacredness of the
individual's being, consciousness and personality. Personalism
is a philosophy which, applied to theology as it is in the Boston
school, strongly affirms the existence and importance of the
soul in each human and sentient being and reaffirms the existence
and essense of God in a rather complex, nuanced and unique relationship
with each person. It also is quite critical of impersonalistic
theories and thought - social Darwinism, Communism, etc. Martin
explained Personalism this way.
I studied philosophy and theology at Boston
University under Edgar S. Brightman and L. Harold DeWolf. ...
It was mainly under these teachers that I studied Personalistic
philosophy - the theory that the clue to the meaning of ultimate
reality is found in personality. This personal idealism remains
today my basic philosophical position. Personalism's insistence
that only personality - finite and infinite - is ultimately real
strengthened me in two convictions: it gave me metaphysical and
philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it
gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all
human personality. 3
A key to understanding King is that he was
a philosopher, by far the most important of the 20th century,
a philosopher who shook society to its core and changed the world.
Dr. King's was professionaly trained, over many years, in philosophy.
As a child he was immersed in the Baptist fundamentalism of his
father's church. But in his teens he developed deep doubts and
began studying philosophy as an undergraduate at Morehouse College,
then continued at Crozer, University of Pennsylvania, Boston
University and Harvard. His life and actions were animated by
a deep love, understanding and use of philosophy. King's six
books mention many philosophers and philosophical concepts. In
fact his first book, Stride Toward Freedom (1958) sites
18 different philosophers just in telling the story of the 381
day Montgomery Bus Boycott sparked by Rosa Parks. 4
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Personally, meanwhile, King was waging a concerted
campaign to marry. Having decided upon a career in the ministry
as a Baptist pastor, at least temporarily, he needed to get married.
In the black church of the time, and even today, an unmarried
pastor was unacceptable. Marriage was a must. The pastor's wife
was considered a pillar of the church and a gurantee of the pastor's
stability and good character. Ministry without marriage, and
marriage without children, was unheard of.
Imperious Daddy King, intent on ML joining
him after graduation and eventually succeeding him at Ebenezer,
had been forcefully pressing the marriage issue for some time.
His plan had been to match Martin with a suitable member of elite
Negro society in Atlanta, but the many attempts had all gone
awry.
King, although often in conflict with his
father, felt a deep connection with his family. He frequently
called home, collect, to chat for two or three hours, mostly
with his mother, describing every detail of his days - including
his dates. The pressure was on to find a wife, both from within
and without.
Coretta Scott King - in a 2003 telephone interview
with a Boston Globe reporter - described meeting an eager Martin
- over the phone - after her number was slipped to him by a mutual
friend.
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Coretta Scott. Antioch College class photo.
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The truth is, Martin and I met on the
telephone.
He said, 'I like the way you talk, and I'd
like to meet you.' We agreed to meet for lunch the next day at
Sharaf's on Massachusetts Avenue, and he said, 'I usually make
it in 10 minutes, but tomorrow, I'll make it in 7.'
On our first date he deliberately asked a
question that had to do with capitalism versus communism. ...
I remember I made an intelligent comment, and he said, 'Oh, I
see you know something other than music.' I thought, of course
I did. I was a graduate of Antioch College. I had thoughts of
my own.
He said, You know, you have everything I ever
wanted in a wife: intelligence, beauty, character, and personality.
When can I see you again? I said I really didn't know because
I had a tight schedule.
... he ways always trying to convince me I
was it ... but I kept struggling with my own ambitions for a
long time. I knew getting married would lead me away from performing
and the direction I'd hoped to go.
We got married in 1953, and the rest is history.
When I finally opened myself up to the relationship, I knew this
was my direction. 5
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to Boston in the fall of 1953 and got settled in again, Martin
resumed talks with his thesis advisor, L. Harold DeWolf, about
the Ph.D. dissertation that he would write in 1954, at the end
of the current academic year. |
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Dr. King leading the April 23,
1965 March on Boston.
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Dr, King revisited his old neighborhood in the spring of 1965
and brought along tens of thousands of friends as witnesses.
Marching had become one of his major political methods, as described
in an invitational letter to the April 23 March on Boston.
In August of 1963 the citizens of this country marched on
Washington, 200,000 strong, demanding freedom and justice for
all our citizens. Last month Americans marched from Selma to
Montgomery demanding that Alabama free its Negro citizens from
the bondage in which they are held. Dr. Martin Luther King was
at the front of both of those marches.
The focus of the march was the deplorable state of the Boston
schools which served, or rather mis-served, African American
students. Substandard housing and unemployment in the black community
were also concerns.
On Friday, April 23 [1965], Dr. King will come to Boston.
He is calling upon the citizens of Massachusetts and New England
to join with him in placing before the political and economic
leaders of this state the need for immediate action in the fields
of education, housing, and jobs. The Negroes of Massachusetts
have had to accept bad schools, slum housing, and inadequate
job opportunities for all too long.
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Editor's note ... We're going to jump ahead
here - for now - to deal with the difficult issue of plagiarism
in Dr. King's thesis and other works.
In 1990 the editor of Dr. King's papers, Clayborne
Carson, very reluctantly confirmed the shocking fact that large
parts of King's Ph.D. dissertation - and his other student papers
- were in fact plagiarized. The New York Times reported it this
way.
"We found that there was a pattern of
appropriation, of textual appropriation," said the 46-year-old
historian, who was active in the civil rights movement and has
written extensively on black history. He spoke at a news conference
at Stanford, called after an article in The Wall Street Journal
yesterday disclosed details of the project's findings. "By
the strictest definition of plagiarism -- that is, any appropriation
of words or ideas -- there are instances of plagiarism in these
papers."
Although he said that he believed Dr. King
had acted unintentionally, Mr. Carson said that Dr. King had
been sufficiently well acquainted with academic principles and
procedures to have understood the need for extensive footnotes,
and he was at a loss to explain why Dr. King had not used them.
Mr. Carson and other scholars who have seen
the papers declined to say how great a percentage of the material
had been plagiarized, but they said it was enough to indicate
a serious violation of academic principles. 6
Dr. King's plagiarism is almost impossible
to understand, difficult to accept and both diminishes and doesn't
dim his stature. Facts are stubborn things. We have to face the
fact that careful scholarship over five years by a team of trained
researchers, headed by a noted historian hand-picked by Coretta
Scott King in 1985, uncovered a pattern of plagiarism in his
nearly 400 page thesis and other student works. And this finding,
hidden for over 30 years, opens up other very troubling questions
- what about his speeches, books and sermons? What about I
Have a Dream?
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Editor's note ... The following four paragraphs
of text will appear at the end of this article,
Dr. Martin Luther King's time in Boston had
a profound influence on him. Malcom X's life and work was forged
in Boston. Here, Martin pursued his doctoral studies in Christian
theology at Boston University. Malcolm learned to read and created
his own education while imprisoned for burglary in Charlestown
and other state prisons. Both sons of Baptists ministers preached
and ministered here, Martin in Baptist churches, Malcolm at Nation
of Islam temples.
Both left to blaze on the world stage, but
both repeatedly returned back to Boston and acknowledged the
inluence the city had had upon them. Martin arrived in Boston
in the fall of 1951 to enroll at B.U. for graduate studies just
as Malcolm was finishing his intense prison self-education, receiving
parole in 1952.
Martin, born on January 15, 1929, would be
81 this year. Malcolm, born May 19, 1929, would be 85. Both could
be alive today and serving as important American elder statesmen
of the stature of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, who's 92 this
year. But both lives were brutally cut short by assasins bullets,
Martin in 1965 at age 39 and Malcolm in 1965 at 40.
We'll look at Malcolm's troubled times in
The Hub beginning with the May 15 issue of Roofscape in the companion
article X in Boston.
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| Timeline of Dr. Martin Luther
King's time in Boston and related events. |
| January
15, 1929 |
Martin
Luther King, Jr. born in Atlanta, Georgia. |
| Fall 1943 |
King enters Morehouse
College, age 15. |
| Fall 1948 |
King enters Crozier
Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania. |
| September
1951 |
Martin
Luther King, Jr. moves to Boston. |
| September
13, 1951 |
King
enters the Boston University School of Theology. |
| January
1, 1952 |
Martin
is introduced to Coretta by a fellow student at the New England
Conservatory of Music. |
| February
25, 1952 |
Kings
academic advisor at B.U., theologian Edgar S. Brightman (born
1884), dies. L. Harold DeWolf becomes his new advisor. |
| June
18, 1953 |
Martin
and Coretta marry at Scott's home near Marion, Alabama with his
father, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Sr., presiding. They
live at the King residence in Atlanta for the rest of the summer. |
| Fall 1953 |
The Kings return
to Boston, renting a new apartment in the South End. He resumes
discussions with Dr. DeWolf about his Ph.D. dissertation. |
| January
25, 1954 |
King
delivers a trial sermon, The Three Dimensions of a Complete
Life, at the Dexter Avenue Baptists Church in Montgomery,
Alabama. Soon after he is offered the position as their new pastor. |
| April
14, 1954 |
King
accepts the Dexter pastorate. |
| May
2, 1954 |
King
delivers his first sermon at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. |
| May
17, 1954 |
Brown
v. Board of Education. The U.S. Supreme Court rules that segregation
in public schools is unconstitutional. |
| June 5, 1955 |
King receives his
doctorate from Boston University. |
| December
1, 1955 |
Rosa
Parks arrested in Montgomery, Alabama for refusing to move to
the back of the bus, sparking the 381 day Montgomery bus boycot. |
| December
5, 1955 |
Montgomery
Bus Boycot begins. |
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Image ... Dr. Martin Luther King. Courtesy
of MLK Online.
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